ipl-logo

Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction Of Dresden

825 Words4 Pages

War Crime? From a historical German perspective, the account of the events of Dresden was highly distorted by Joesph Goebbels use of the event for propaganda to accuse the Allies of committing a war crime. Although none of the official responsible for the bombing were charged for the bombing of Dresden, the perspective that the bombing consitued a war crime, and those responsible should be tried as war criminals is one that has become widespread. The argument for Dresden as a war crime is often supported by the high number of civilian causalities as a result of the bombing. However, these casualty numbers were based on a figure of over 200,000 deaths quoted in a forged version of the casualty report, Tagesbefehl No. 47, that originated …show more content…

Although Irving’s book that arguably opened the debate over the bombing from a British and American perspective he has been largely discredited among academic circles, as not only have many of the facts he states been proven incorrect, such as the causalities number, but also Irving’s extreme political views have been brought to light with strong evidence that he is a holocaust denier. Thus, his work on the subject of Dresden is undoubtedly extremely biased. However, even though Irving's work has been discredited, he impact on the discussion on Dresden is major, and several sources after Irving’s publication also used the false 135,000 figure. As a result, many academic perspectives have been tainted by the false evidence presented by …show more content…

And in particular, NPD's Juergen Gansel, who described the attacks as “mass murder” and “Dresden holocaust of bombs” These neo-nazi groups not only cite the (inflated) causalities figures to support the perspective, but also the various references to the bombing of Dresden as a “terror attack” Notably an offhand remark by British Air Commodore during a press conference in which he said that the bombing of Dresden destroyed “...what is left of german morale.” Even more doubt is cast on the legitimacy of Dresden as a military target by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force document that was issued just after the Dresden bombings which; “celebrating the effect of Allied terror bombing”, and the memo issued by Churchill in which he said “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of german cities simply fro the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretenses, should be reviewed.” (Although he later retracted this statement because of pressure from his chiefs of

Open Document